CrystalDiskMark

RAID-5

RAID-1

RAID-0

To kick things off, we ran CrystalDiskMark, as it's a quick and easy test to run and gives us a baseline for the drive performance. We ran the benchmark over both the 10 Gbps and the 2.5 Gbps interface and despite not being directly bandwidth limited, the random 4K test was affected significantly by going from 10 to 2.5 Gbps. Note that we re-ran this test several times to verify the numbers, and we produced similar results each time. We can't explain why RAID 1 came out on top here, but it shows that Ugreen has some fine-tuning to on the software side.

iPerf3

Next up we ran iPerf3, which is a widely used network throughput test. We tested both the 10 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps interfaces and whereas the 2.5 Gbps interface delivered the expected throughput right away, the 10 Gbps interface required us to run at least three data streams to reach the promised 10 Gbps speeds once the typical Ethernet overheads were taken into account. This is not entirely uncommon though, as there are a lot of variables that can prevent a single data stream from reaching 10 Gbps. Normally we would've preferred to have increased the TCP window size here, as it would've increased the buffer size, but it wasn't possible due to some configuration issue in the UGOS Pro OS. Note that this test purely measures network throughput and doesn't involve the drives.

NAS Performance Tester

The next test is simply called the NAS performance tester, and now we're getting in to some actual drive benchmarks. We configured the NAS performance tester to use an 8 GB data set which is deleted and re-created during each iteration of the test. The test runs five iterations for the read and write operations. The reason the test data is deleted between each test run is to prevent any kind of caching from taking place.

Helios LanTest

Helios RAID 5 10 Gbps               Helios RAID 5 2.5 Gbps


Helios RAID 1 10 Gbps               Helios RAID 1 2.5 Gbps


Helios RAID 0 10 Gbps               Helios RAID 0 2.5 Gbps

The fourth and final synthetic benchmark test is a tool called Helios LanTest which runs seven different tests to measure both response time, but also raw throughput of a NAS. We ran the test fives times which produces an average of those five runs to eliminate potential outliers. Due to a slightly smaller data set, we can see a vastly improved read performance over the NAS performance tester, although the data set is still larger than that used by CrystalDiskMark and as such it doesn't reach as high speeds over 10 Gbps. As the Helios LanTest lacks a 2.5 Gbps option, we kept the 10 Gbps settings for testing the 2.5 Gbps interface of the NASync DXP4800 Plus.